Larry McMurtry once concluded that nearly all of Texas literature was minor and sentimentalist. Writers like J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb mourned a Texas that had been dead for nearly half a century by the time they published their paeans to the open plains, cattle drives and an untamed nature. For most of the male authors that dominate the state’s literary canon, including John Graves and McMurtry himself, the defining features and forces of Texas’ past have been masculine. “The frontier was not feminine, it was masculine,” was McMurtry’s explanation for why men were so often the central characters in Texas fiction. But something changed by the 1950s and 1960s: Texas had become urban. “The Metropolis which has now engulfed [the state] is feminine…” McMurtry concluded somewhat begrudgingly. In his view, women and cities had unalterably changed the character of the state and the characters of its fiction, and not necessarily for the better.
Contemporary poet Analicia Sotelo has a response for McMurtry and his ilk: “The virgins are here to prove a point. / The virgins are here to tell you to fuck off. / The virgins are certain there’s a circle of hell / dedicated to that fear you’ll never find anyone else.”
(DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)
